For the bored, locked-down and lonely

Category: Shit to draw

Activity Double Feature: Draw a portrait, write a haiku

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I’m so sorry, Bowie

We’ve got a couple of quick and fun ideas for whiling away an hour or two today!

Flash portrait drawing

This is a pretty hysterical way to pass the time and get creative! You can do this with a live person, or even using a photo of someone as a reference. 

-Get a pencil, a pen, or a piece of charcoal, and sheet of paper. 

-Set a timer (1 minute is good, but it can be longer or shorter, just try it out). 

-Pick up the pencil, start the timer, stare deep into the eyes of your subject, and start drawing the portrait. BUT, you’re not allowed to look down at the sheet of paper for the duration of the timer.

– Once the timer rings, look down at your work of art. Your subject is bound to feel deeply flattered.

Try this with a friend taking it in turns to do the drawing, and see whether your art changes each time you create a new portrait! Do you get used to the time constraint? Do you find yourself focusing on specific features or techniques as you get more practice? How does your portrait differ when you change the time limit to 2 or 5 minutes?

Writing prompt: Write a haiku

Haiku poems are very simple: three lines of seven, five and seven syllables. They don’t even have to rhyme.

You can challenge yourself to try and express your mood in a haiku, or describe an activity you’ve done in the day.

It’s also a fun game with a friend, partner or family member. Pick a topic, like, for example: Corona. 

Then, you all write a haiku around that topic, and read the results out to each other:

Pandemic? Please don’t panic.

Instead, write Haiku.

That’s good shit to do. 

Activity: Make pixel art art

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The finished product

Pixel art is charming, retro and kinda goofy, and I see no reason whatsoever to restrict it purely to the realm of the computer monitor. I want pixel art I can enjoy in an analogue setting; I need pixel art on my walls; I demand pixel art in my kitchen. And since I’m sure you feel exactly the same way, let’s make some pixel art art together.

You will need:

  • An image editing/painting application such as Photoshop, MS Paint or GIMP
  • Some paper and coloured pencils, a canvas and paint or a medium of your preference (perhaps even cross-stitch kit!)
  1. Set up your digital canvas

A good real-life pixel size is about 1cm square. With this in mind, you need to measure your canvas and figure out the dimensions of your digital canvas. I actually had a couple of cheap canvases lying around so I took this mini one and measured it – it was 20x20cm, meaning that I can work on a digital canvas 20×20 pixels in size. Create a new artwork in your art software with those dimensions and fill the canvas with the principal background colour you want. Then, obviously, zoom right in so you can see what you’re doing.

A 20 by 20 pixel canvas in photoshop

2. Lay out your foundational shape

Rather than drawing an outline like we might in traditional art, pixel art is easiest (I find) when starting with a silhouette. Pick a colour that is common in the object you want to portray, and then draw its rough shape. I decided to paint an apple, since this is going to go in my kitchen – and still-life-style I’m going to use a real apple as a reference. The silhouette doesn’t have to be perfectly accurate; pixel art is more like a cartoon, focusing on the recognisability of an artistic subject.

The silhouette of an apple drawn in a rosy red colour

3. Add in the other base colours

Old-school pixel art for games consoles and ancient computers had serious limitations, one of which being that you only had a small number of colours to work with. We don’t have to worry about these restrictions anymore (unless you want to do pixel art in hard mode) but it’s still worth picking out the base colours in the image and blocking them out on your silhouette to give you a structure to build upon for the next steps.

Now the apple has a green side and a red side
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